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Monday, October 17, 2011

Yet another chance for me to use the word "kerfuffle"

So. The National Book Awards. Wow. Way to royally screw things up. In case you're just joining us, five books were released as nominees for the "Young People's Literature" category. When first released, the list consisted of the following books: Shine by Lauren Myracle, My Name Is Not Easy by Debby Dhal Edwardson, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy and Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt.

Then it turned out that it wasn't supposed to be Shine by Lauren Myracle at all, but Chime by Franny Billingsley. Awkward. Also, it leads me to my first question: how the hell did they make that mistake? Supposedly it was a mishearing over a telephone call, but, like, wouldn't you also say the author's name too when giving a list of books that you were nominating for an award? Apparently you should. And then no one caught this mistake for days. Embarrassing, but people make mistakes, etc.

So the National Book Awards decided that they would go with six nominations, since it was their fault and Lauren Myracle had already been notified that her book had been nominated. Totally reasonable, we all understand. Except then they changed their minds. Lauren Myracle was asked to withdraw her book (See! It's OK! They didn't remove her! She asked to be withdrawn) which she did. Because Lauren Myracle is classy unlike some other people/organizations we could mention.

So suck it National Book Awards people. Why the frack did you have to pull that? "Preserve the integrity of the award and the judges’ work" my ass. You made a mistake, you owned up to it, you were doing just fine and then you had to go pull a total dick move and now all the book people are mad at you. And since you're in the book business, that's a bad thing.

GoodReads

To access our full book list, click on the words "goodreads" above, and you'll be taken to our Goodreads account. Click on "read" to see the full list, which can be sorted by title or author. Click on any of the other genre tags to see the books that fall in that category.